Sunday, January 6, 2013

Blogiversary (now there's an execrable word!)

Today, 6 January 2013, is the fourth anniversity of AWOL. I will
spend most of the day in aircraft or in airports. Not a very
interesting thing to do.

AWOL has a steadily increasing readership - somthing over a million page views so far. Recent statistics are here.

2569 entries (beginning here), well over a thousand open access journals identified, countless digitized books cited, a constant stream of born digital scholarship tagged.It's a tribute to you - the producers and
consumers of all of this - that a portal (though I prefer the anaolgy of
lens or prism) like AWOL is meaningful. Congratulations to us all!

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.